This largely rather charming movie was apparently adapted from a graphic novel, which I’m going to have to locate and read as a comparison. But taken on its own, it’s certainly worth watching, with two or three really outstanding performances and perfectly good ones from everybody else. There was the added bonus for me that I had no idea, going in, that it was about writers, and so the opening scene of a bunch of writers at work with the various processes voiced over was unexpectedly funny. :)

On one level, the movie is about Tamara Drewe, a young woman from a small village who used to have an enormously unattractive nose and who got a nose job and became 1. beautiful, and 2. a journalist, but is obliged to return home to sell her house after her mother’s death, and perhaps to rekindle her teenage romance with the extremely gorgeous local boy. Meantime, a local couple runs a writers’ retreat, which is to say the wife runs it while her husband the extremely successful crime novelist cheats on her. Hijinks, as they say, ensue. To most people, probably the basic story is whether the girl gets the boy.

To me, a writer–and I suggest not clicking through unless you wish to be spoiled, because the remainder of this sentence is a GREAT BIG SPOILER–

–to me, the thrust of the movie was “Do not cheat on your muse or you will get trampled to death by cows.”

Seriously. That’s what happens to the philandering novelist. This is a romantic comedy, for heaven’s sake. People don’t get trampled to death by cows in romantic comedies! Except he did. And it’s made wonderfully clear from the beginning that he’s utterly incapable of writing without the wife upon whom he cheats, so really: do not cheat on your muse, or you will get trampled to death by cows.